Historical Scope

The Modernist Journals Project digitizes English-language literary magazines from the 1890s to the 1920s. We also offer essays and other supporting materials from the period.

TIMELINE

We end at 1922 for two reasons: first, that year has until recently been the public domain cutoff in the United States; second, most scholars consider modernism to be fully fledged in 1922 with the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. We believe the materials in the MJP will show how essential magazines were to the rise and maturation of modernism.

The New Age, a socialist weekly from London that did much to publish new ideas in art, literature, and politics.

Our History

The MJP began in 1995 at Brown University, with funding from the University and small local grants, as a website of digital editions of periodicals connected to the rise of modernism in the English-speaking world.

Our first major project began in 1996: a digital edition of The New Age, a British weekly magazine edited by A. R. Orage, from 1907 to 1922. In the course of preparing this edition, the MJP generated various supporting materials, including essays on contributors to the magazine, historical introductions to each six-month volume, and biographical sketches of over a thousand artists mentioned in the magazine, along with images of their work. Our edition of The New Age was completed, with the aid of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, in 2004.

The University of Tulsa joined the MJP in 2003. In 2005, using copies in Tulsa’s McFarlin Library, we were able to add Dana, an Irish magazine of 1904-1905 best known for first publishing James Joyce. In that same year, the MJP redesigned its technological infrastructure from scratch, both to accommodate growth and to bring its materials and methods into conformance with the best practices of the digital library community. At the same time, in response to requests from members of the Modernist Studies Association, the MJP added a digital edition of the well-known Vorticist magazine, Blast, based on copies in the McFarlin Library. The MJP’s website was also redesigned from the ground up, adding a data-driven, standards-compliant interface to the MJP’s resources.

With the help of another NEH grant during the 2008-2009 academic year, the MJP added a run of Poetry Magazine, from 1912 through 1922, and The English Review for the period when Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford) edited it, from 1908 to 1910. In the following year, the MJP completed a digital edition of Scribner’s Magazine, from 1910 through 1922. A third NEH grant, during the 2010-2011 academic year, allowed the MJP to produce editions of The Crisis, The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, The Egoist, The Little Review, and Others. During the 2011-12 academic year, the MJP also added an edition of The Dome (first series: 1897-1898) as well as a set of pages devoted to the Imagist Anthologies (1914-1917). That year also saw the launch of the MJP Lab, an area of research and teaching modules plus data downloads to support computational analysis of the periodicals. A fourth NEH grant from 2014-2016 allowed the MJP to add the muckraking years of McClure’s Magazine (1902-1911), a run of The Smart Set (1913-1922), The Masses, Camera Work, and The Seven Arts.

In 2016, the MJP began to migrate from its scratch-built infrastructure into the new Brown Digital Repository. The BDR offers new possibilities for computational analysis and use of our data through an Application Programming Interface (API). In 2019, we completed a brand new website with enhanced magazine viewing options. We are currently preparing a new round of digitized periodicals.

Staff

Robert Scholes, Founder (d. 2016)

The Modernist Journals Project is the brain child of Robert Scholes, who directed the MJP at Brown from 1995 to 2012, when he retired from active involvement with the project. Bob was a senior scholar of modernism, whose work is widely known. He was President of the Modern Language Association in 2004.

Sean Latham, Senior Advisor

Beginning in 2003, Bob was joined by Sean Latham as co-director the MJP at Tulsa. A former Project Manager of the MJP at Brown, Sean is Editor of the James Joyce Quarterly at Tulsa, a Professor of English there, and the author of books and articles on modernist literature and humanities computing. He hosted the meeting of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) at Tulsa in October 2006 and was President of the MSA in 2008-2009. In 2014, Sean became Director of the Oklahoma Center for Humanities at Tulsa, and stepped down from active involvement in the MJP; he is currently a senior advisor to the project.

Susan Smulyan, Director of the MJP at Brown

Susan joined the project in 2012 to help oversee the MJP's latest NEH grant. She is a Professor of American Studies at Brown as well as Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. She is the author of Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting and Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-Century, and co-editor of Major Problems in American Popular Culture. She is currently interested in the relationship between the public arts and the public humanities.

Jeffrey Drouin, Director of the MJP at Tulsa

Jeff was the project's associate director from 2011 before replacing Sean as the Tulsa director in 2014. He is an Associate Professor of English with a special focus on Modernism and the Digital Humanities. His first book, James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture: The Einstein of English Fiction, was published by Routledge in 2015. He is currently completing a digital humanities and book project on church architecture and memory in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.

Clifford Wulfman, Technical Advisor

Cliff holds a PhD from Yale University in modern literature and an MS in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania. He has published work on modernism and humanities computing, including Modernism in the Magazines, which he co-wrote with Bob Scholes. Cliff is currently the Coordinator of Library Digital Initiatives at Princeton University, where he directs the Blue Mountain Project and is and a consultant for the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton.

Mark Gaipa, Senior Editor

Mark worked as project manager at Brown from 2008 to 2014, when he became a Senior Editor at the project. Mark holds a PhD from Brown in English literature, has published on modernism, rhetoric, and writing pedagogy, and has taught at Harvard University as well as the Universities of Freiburg and Stuttgart in Germany.

Contributors

Though the MJP has been administered by the staff, the material that appears on the MJP website would not have been possible without the dedication and hard work of many other people from both Brown and Tulsa. Carlos Acosta-Ponce, Renée Allen (former project manager at Brown), Tara Aveilhe (project manager at Tulsa: 2012-14), James Bachman, Alex Barchet, Lydia Kelow Bennett, Srdan Beronja, Richard Black (former project manager at Tulsa), Allie Blair, Peter Boyer, Harrison Brockwell, Colleen Brogan, Sarah Brown, Charlotte Buecheler, David Chandler, Kenny Coane, Hannah Covington, Jeff Covington, Beth Csomay, Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, Abel Debritto (a Fulbright fellow from Spain and assistant project manager at Brown from 2012 to 2014), Drew Dickerson, Siera Dissmore, Kent Emerson (project manager at Tulsa: 2014-15), Derek Ettensohn, Laura Fisher, Lindsey Gilbert, Ashley Greene, Stewart Habig, Robert Hilliker, Eunice Hong, Christian Howard, Matt Huculak, Joanna Iacono, Rachel Isaacs, Christina Johantgen, Omer Ali Kazmi, Matt Kochis (project manager at Tulsa: 2010-12), Adam Kopp, Chris La Casse, Wendy Lee, Jeff Longacre, Annie Macdonald, Erika Manouselis, Kerry McAuliffe, Susan McNeil (MCM Department Manager at Brown), Rebecca McClure, Tiffany Mendoza, David Noriega, Annie Paige, Daphné Rentfrow (former project manager at Brown), Susan Solomon, Robert Sullivan (former project manager at Brown), Jonathan Tinnin, Colleen Tripp (research associate and MJP proctor at Brown: 2013-14), Matt Vaughn, Alex Verdolini, Jacqueline Wernimont, and Robert Yeates.

Advisors

INTERNATIONAL BOARD OF ADVISORS

Ann Ardis

Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Delaware, author of Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880-1922 and other works on modernism

Peter Brooker

Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK, author of Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism and other works on modernism

Maria DiBattista

Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, author of High and Low Moderns: British Literature and Culture 1889-1939 and other works on modernism

Suzanne Churchill

Associate Professor of English at Davidson College, author of The Little Magazine OTHERS and the Renovation of American Poetry and other works on little magazines and modernism

David Earle

Associate Professor of English and Foreign Languages at the University of West Florida, author of Recovering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form and All Man!: Hemingway, 1950s Men’s Magazines, and the Masculine Persona

TULSA ADVISORY BOARD

Kalpana Misra

Professor of Political Science and Dean of Arts and Sciences

Marc Carlson

Head of Special Collections, McFarlin Library

Adrian Alexander

Dean of McFarlin Library

BROWN ADVISORY BOARD

From the Library

Nora Dimmock

Deputy University Librarian

Elli Mylonas

Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship